Western Digital Adds First Branded SSD Drives: WD Blue and Green

[Julio Urquidi]

Just months after acquiring SanDisk, Western Digital announced it is adding solid state drives (SSDs) as another branch to its family of internal storage products. WD Blue PC SSDs and WD Green PC SSDs will join WD's color-coded hard drive families, including WD Red for NAS drives, WD Purple for surveillance and WD Black for performance-rated systems.

WD Blue PC SSDs are designed for everyday desktop systems and are available in 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB capacities. The new Blue SSDs come in 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors, and have sequential read and write speeds of up to 545 MB/s and 525 MB/s. MSRP for the new Blue SSDs range from $79.00 to $299.00.

WD Green PC SSDs have lower power consumption and come in 120 GB and 240 GB capacities in both 2.5-inch and M.2 form factors. Performance-wise, the Green SSDs feature sequential read and write speeds of 540 MB/s and 405 MB/s, respectively. MSRPs for the WD Green SSDs have not been announced yet.

Both WD Blue SSDs and Green SSDs are rated at 1.75M hours MTTF, have TBWs of 400 for the former, and 80 for the latter product,and come with a 3-year limited warranty.

WD Blue SSDs are shipping now, and WD Green SSDs are expected to release later this quarter.